The present invention relates to an image forming apparatus such as a copying apparatus or an electronic printer for forming an image on a recording medium and, more particularly, to an image forming apparatus with a stacking apparatus for stacking an exhausted recording medium with images thereon.
In a conventional copying apparatus, as shown in FIG. 1, a sheet P is supplied from a paper cassette 1 to an image forming section, and an image is transferred to the sheet P. The sheet P is then discharged from an discharge port 2 and stacked on a tray 3.
The sheet P is discharged on the tray 3 such that an image formation surface P' of the sheet P faces upward so as to allow an operator to see the formed image.
When the discharged sheets P are stacked on the tray 3 while the image formation surfaces P' thereof face upward, the order of sheets P is reversed at the end of the copying operation. In other words, the uppermost image corresponds to the last document image. In order to rearrange the sheets P in the same order as that of the document images, the stacked sheets P must be reversed in order again, resulting in a cumbersome operation.
In addition, when each of a plurality of documents is to be copied a plurality of times, a plurality of copied sheets are stacked on the tray 3 in units of documents. In this case, the boundary between a plurality of copied sheets for a given document and those for a document next to the given document cannot be easily identified. For this reason, a sorting/stacking apparatus called a sorter is proposed. When a copying apparatus has a sorter, the overall size is increased at high cost.